‘Why don’t I add my £120,000 to your £80,000?’ suggested the man on the platform. ‘Then we could get something better.’
We?
I don’t remember any introduction, as he strolled across to where I stood at the foot of the escalator, leaning on the corner of the wall where it opened onto the dark, uninviting railway platform at Gatwick airport. Deserted except for the two of us, much too early for the first train. I suppose he must have asked if I was going to Brighton. I was. He wasn’t; he was going home, which was somewhere along the way. He didn’t look as if he’d been on a wild night out, but I wasn’t registering much at five in the morning, after a four-hour flight on which I hadn’t slept a wink.
Eventually – rather quickly, in fact – we’d got onto house-buying. He’d probably asked where I lived, forcing me to explain.
‘We could go to Portugal,’ he ventured, after I’d muttered something about Brexit taking away my choices. Portugal was supposed to be the easiest EU country to obtain a residency visa for, I concurred, but I didn’t know it well and wasn’t sure if it was my place. I was playing along to the best of my ability. It was a game, wasn’t it?
‘I don’t like it all that much,’ he screwed up his nose. ‘It’s too backward.’
He’d lived there before. He’d also lived in Dubai. Did I like Dubai? I admitted that it wasn’t really my kind of place, and began to explain why. He was losing interest. He’d cut short the suggestion of New York, on seeing my expression. He was a dog person; he wasn’t impressed by the assertion of needing cats. The conversation turned to investing: how could I increase my capital, now that our joining of resources didn’t seem such a good idea after all? The flirtation, of course, was simply passing the time, and I was barely participating. I wanted to lie down.
‘I don’t sleep much,’ he confessed. ‘My brain is too active.’
I wondered what he did for work, if he had thousands of pounds floating around ready to give to random, unknown women twenty years his senior. He wasn’t a bad-looking chap, now I’d looked properly: dark brown skin; close-cropped, African hair; tall, strong and expensively, if casually, dressed. He had approached me because I was the only other being in sight in the chill of dawn, and he was playing with ideas, seeing if they fit.
He dealt in crypto currency, apparently. He was very wealthy, he confided. He could offer me more than £120,00 then, I didn’t say. In my weary, semi-attentive state I mused upon whether I would think him attractive, in a more appropriate setting. We’d been interacting for around half an hour; I’ve had shorter relationships. But he found me weird, I could tell. Perhaps for the first time, and now that I have broken free and am clearer about what I want – and don’t want – in life, I saw myself through a stranger’s eyes and understood that I am, in fact, odder than most. This is undoubtedly why I’m still single, and surely why I’m happy to stay that way.
I am The Cat That Walked by Himself. I loved that Just-So story as a young child, and even then, I saw myself thus. My mother thought me pretentious when I declared a shared identity with The Fool on the Hill, though she didn’t fully understand what I was getting at. Only-children are self-sufficient children, and I don’t need a full-time companion in my life, no matter how much I might have liked one at various times in the past. The missing point, however, is that I’m not like many other people. That knowledge – that inability to find one’s tribe – is far lonelier than being alone. The two states are unrelated.
I don’t desire the things most people seem to crave. Instead, what I value most is what those around me would hasten to change. Freedom is everything. Solitude is divine. In April, I’ll have been technically homeless for two years, and I’ve relished every minute of it. That’s not to say I’m not (kind-of) looking forward to settling into a cosy space once again, finding a suitable place to paint, and being reunited with my Highland Stoneware bowls which I miss eating out of. But I’m incredibly fussy about the attributes that place must have, and I am not going to rush into anything.
‘You can’t have everything,’ declared a friend in a rather negative moment. ‘You’re not going to find it all in the one property, are you?’ I most certainly will, though it might be a bit tricky on my tiny budget.
A substantial cash injection would have been very welcome indeed – if no strings were attached. But it seems, after all, that no strings were even considered; as the train finally pulled into the station, the doors opened and a small handful of people climbed aboard, the chatty, rich man, whose name I never asked, stepped into a different carriage.
…
Kipling, R. (1902) ‘The Cat That Walked by Himself.’ Just-So Stories, Macmillan, London
Lennon-McCartney. (1967) ‘The Fool on the Hill.’ From Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles. EMI, London